Assessment of carcinogenic hazard of chemical mixtures through analysis of binary chemical interaction data.

Assessment of the potential health hazard of environmental complex chemical mixtures is one of the most difficult and challenging problems in toxicology. In this article, we describe the development of an innovative computerized system for ranking and predicting potential cancer hazard of chemical mixtures. We take into consideration both the additive risk of individual carcinogens present and the projected overall interaction effect of the mixture based on analyzing and integrating the possible interaction effects of all binary pairs of individual constituents of the mixture. Using this system, it can be predicted that a number of mixtures of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons should have a carcinogenic risk lower than that calculated by the simple additivity model, whereas the reverse is true for a number of other mixtures. The system can be very useful in hazard ranking and priority setting in dealing with mixture problems such as cleanup of hazardous waste.